There has been extensive concern, and rightly so, about the impact of cuts on families and the strain placed on family dynamics by the stress of debt and unemployment. But for migrant families, the situation is about to get worse: the government is consulting on new proposals to restrict their rights to even live together as a family.

Only British citizens earning above a certain, as yet unspecified, amount may be allowed to bring in their spouses and dependants. This is an outrageous assault on the right of unemployed people and those on low incomes to marry unless they can prove that they can support their partners and children. It also seems unnecessary when currently non-British spouses have no recourse to public funds in any case.

Immigration officers have long had the right to enter bedrooms at dawn, if one of the spouses is non-British, to check if both spouses are at home but now it is proposed that a marriage is more genuine the longer it continues: the probationary period may be extended from two years to five years before the non-British spouse can get leave to remain. But one in seven genuine marriages breaks down between two and six years anyway. This is a real blow to the campaign, run by Southall Black Sisters and other women's groups, which has won limited concessions to the two-year rule for women escaping domestic violence.

Further tests to establish the genuineness of marriages will be based on interviews to check how well the couple know each other – a near impossibility for those communities where arranged marriages are the tradition. The much disliked Primary Purpose rule (in which couples were expected to know the full names of each other's grandparents, for example), which was abolished by the Labour government, is making a reappearance through the backdoor.

The proposals suggest making forced marriage a criminal offence, which is opposed by many women's groups as a recent survey by Aisha Gill found. Women's groups have found that the protection orders under the new civil law, the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act, are working fairly well to protect young women facing the prospect of a forced marriage and fear that criminalisation will paradoxically reduce protection as women will be unwilling to take such extreme action against their parents. Obviously, the government believes that the deterrent effect of a criminal offence will help to cut migrant numbers. So what sort of reduction can this hope to achieve? The Forced Marriage Unit recorded 1,600 cases in 2008.

The government also raised the age of marriage to foreign spouses from 18 to 21 as a way of tackling forced marriage. Currently this is being challenged by the Quila case, in which a 17-year-old British citizen fell in love with a Chilean national. Having fallen foul of this rule, they cannot live lawfully together in this country. The Home Office lost at the court of appeal but the case is now awaiting a decision from the supreme court. The court did not declare that the age rules were outright unlawful, but that the blanket nature of the ban and the absence of any effort to distinguish genuine marriages from forced ones was unlawful.

While forced marriages are tackled out of so-called concern for the plight of Asian women, English language tests are to be made tougher in the name of integration. Only 53,000 people used the family route to migration and only a tiny proportion of these will be involved in sham marriages. The government is scraping the barrel in order to meet its often repeated promise to cut the number of non-EU migrants from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands. It can't achieve this reduction because some cuts will hurt the UK economy.

There are many others horrors contained in these proposals. In any other context, there would have been a huge outcry. Are the lives of migrants and their loved ones of so little value that such a sustained onslaught on their rights may, with a little tinkering, become official policy? This must not be allowed to happen in our name.